Saturday, October 1, 2011

Response to Anjula Razdan’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It”

In Anjula Razdan’s article “What’s Love Got to Do with It” she talks about arranged marriages, love, and online dating. She was born and raised in Illinois by her parents who emigrated to American from India, although she was the product of an arranged marriage she grew up under the “spell of Western romantic love”. Growing up in the West, she is clearly going to have different views on the East tradition although she is Indian. In the West, arranged marriages are less likely to occur than in the East. I agree with Razdan when she states,“The very idea of an arranged marriage offended my ideas of love and liberty—to me, the act of choosing who to love represented the very essence of freedom. To take away that choice seemed like an attack not just on my autonomy as a person, but on democracy itself”. We should be able to choose who we love, seeing how we’re probably going to spend the rest of our lives with that person.

Computer culture has greatly changed the way people look for love. Instead of going out to social places and meeting new people, people can just go on match.com or eharmony.com and find someone; their “soul mate”. It may be non-traditional meaning no meet and greet, no first dates, but others see it as the easy way out. People are tired of finding someone just for them to break their heart, or to find out that their not the one. So, they turn to the computer to find someone for them that share the same interest and ideas as they do. In the computer culture, two people connect together on a mental level rather than physical attraction, unlike in the dating world where it’s the opposite.

The Eastern way of pairing off is similar to that of a dating service. In the dating service, the service pairs one up with who they think is the best match based off of similar interest and characteristics. The Eastern way of pairing off is by arranged marriages, where the parents pick who will marry their child, based on comparable interests; who they think is the “right” one. Both the dating service and Eastern way of pairing off; chooses the soul mate.

One of the problems with arranged marriages in the U.S. is that the people in the U.S. are too liberal. Living in the U.S. and growing up in the Western culture, I would not like it if my parents tried to arrange a marriage for me. It’s not that we think they have our worst interest at heart; it’s just that we believe we should choose the one we love. Our parents choose everything for us, while growing up, so choosing who we love is a way of liberating ourselves. Also in the West we are allied to physical attraction. Whether or not we like the person’s appearance determines our choice to whether or not we would date them. No one would want a partner who looks like a bum walking with them down the street. In the dating service, meaning cyber world, we do not get to feel that level of physical attraction but instead we have to go off based on a picture on their profile. For all we know, that may not even be them in the picture. One could feel he/she is the one because they have everything in common than when it comes time to meet; they look nothing like their profile pic. I’m not shallow but I do believe looks count for something in a relationship; you have to be at least be attracted to your partner on a physical level.

People’s many conflicting ideas about marriage are contributing to the divorce rate in this country. Many people think that marriages are supposed to be “happily-ever-after’s” when really it requires work. Not every day of marriage is supposed to be happily-ever-after; there will be arguments, upsets and difference of opinions but working through them makes the marriage. Instead of working through problems, spouses think divorce is the best solution. Also, pregnancy is a contributing factor. When a girl gets pregnant at a young age, both parents of the boy and girl forces them to marry. When they marry, they see that they are not the right fit for each other, or one complains that they never got a chance to play the field leaving the marriage in divorce.